Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

Chapter 20. WebRTC

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.

Tim Berners-Lee

The Browser as a Telephone

There is a new revolution brewing in internet communication, and while it isn’t likely to make the news the way the open source telecom revolution did, it very definitely has the potential to quietly replace the heart of every current communication application.

Today, the internet offers a profusion of closed source conferencing applications. They all do roughly the same thing, and yet most require proprietary software to be installed before you can use them (which of course will helpfully attempt to remain loaded in the memory of your computer). Each delivers nothing much different than the last conferencing application you were forced to install (for some other meeting you’ve attended). Each of these companies is hoping that it will rise above the others to dominate the space. Meanwhile, WebRTC is quietly creating a standard that compellingly eliminates all concepts of proprietary multimedia communications, which hopefully will eliminate some of this narrow-minded, walled-garden thinking, and open up communications to some actual innovation.

For as long as there have been web browsers, attempts have been made to integrate multimedia into the internet experience. This has proven more difficult than expected, so that today, it is still common for the telephone to be a separate application (or, of course, a separate device ...